The journey is the destination.

Day 24: Becoming a Startup Artist

“Thoughtless Journaling”

I try not to trust my brain to remember anything. It’s one of the reasons why I journal so much (Tweet, YouTube, blog, etc.) I remember when Gmail came out and I was able to easily go back and check my conversation records. People very quickly would forget things that they clearly stated in writing! I used to be pretty bad about “checking the record”. People don’t like it when you check the record. Now I try to stick to checking the record only for myself about conversations with myself (internally). That’s what I’m doing right now! (Reading yesterday’s post.)

What I’ll be focusing on today is building out my Trello business canvas. I imagine that will take me a day or two (I have a busy day today). I don’t think I’ll be able to do a good job of testing assumptions until I create a business plan which is dependant on things I assume. Oh! I need to start creating the list of people I will be interviewing as well. I’ll create a new Google Doc right now…

Going into Google Drive I just had this flashback about how “cringeworthy” my journaling is when I go back in time. I look forward to curating and sharing it one day. Especially my goal planning… It seems like no matter how hard I try to not write cringeworthy stuff when I go back and look at it I’m like… uh… cringe… lol

My Morning Routine

I’m currently not having one… lol I woke up this morning and watched two PewDiePie videos, checked my YouTube subscriptions (I don’t think I’ve ever checked my YouTube subscriptions ever before in my life!) and decided to watch this TED Talk.

“You are not at the mercy of mystical emotion circuits deep inside your brain.”

I’ve recently become really interested in emotions. Primarily in investigating and understanding my own. There is a lot of new science emerging centered around the brain that I believe will be instrumental in how I approach the things I build moving into the future. I feel as though that TED Talk is connected to the documentary I watched yesterday.

Something beautiful happened in that match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol. A computer program did things that we humans can only describe as creative or genius, but for the computer program, it would have been logical. Lee Sedol also made a move that surprised AlphaGo. A move that I imagine if AlphaGo could speak she too would say it was creative and genius. Because AlphaGo is an it and not a she the programmers were able to go back in time and see what made Lee’s move so brilliant. AlphaGo essentially thought there was a 1 in 10,000 chance that a person would make that move so it didn’t deeply assess what the outcome of that move might be.

Allow me to connect that all back to emotion and get to work! Our mental computers are also constantly looking for emotional trends from external data (sights, sounds, etc.) and internal data (feelings in the stomach, etc.) balanced against past experiences. We interpreted moves that AlphaGo and Lee did as creatively genius when, for them, they were logical. Emotions are the same. They’re logic which gets interpreted (internally) as happy, sad, mad, etc. Emotions are essentially shorthand to express logic which is beyond what we’re able to process real-time. In the example above “creative genius” can be defined as a move that was 1 in 10,000.

Sidenote: I don’t think 1 in 10,000 accurately expresses how unlikely that move was. It was a 1 in 10,000 move inside of a match which would only happen 1 in… might as well say infinite times. I think “the hand of God” is a much more mathematically accurate way to express the likeliness of that move.

Researching Unique Value Proposition

“Points of Difference (PODs): Here’s where you can win the game. [T]he features that are important to your prospects and not available from your competitors.”

Wrap Up!

I’m trying not to do too much work in the evenings so it’s wrap up time! I spent most of the day out of the house so I wasn’t able to get as much done as I would have liked to. I also probably spent too much time thinking about the ramifications of machines doing logical creative work… lol I need to share this picture (even though I think I look like a goofball).

That’s me after walking around near the rental property I checked in on today. The rental property will be an ongoing saga. What felt good in that moment was… the vision of returning to that area every week and doing the thing I love to do (taichi).

Before that, I was at therapy talking about AlphaGo and how emotions are logical… lol I also said, about the gratification of any activity “It’s not about the gold, it’s about the digging.” I like that.

Before that, I was at the entrepreneurship meetup. It’s a small group but I really enjoy the conversations.

It feels good that my head is getting out of the clouds about “startups”. I’m really lasering in on the actions I’ll be taking early on. I’m really excited about the “potential customer” interview process and then selling to early adopters. It legit sounds fun!

Here’s what’s in my mind… rocking pickup artist skills for startup interviewing. Eureka! I need to get a giant yellow fluffy hat and become a startup artist!

#2 Venture Hacks’ High-Concept Pitch
In Made to Stick, Dan and Chip Heath point to how high-concept pitches such as ‘Jaws on a spaceship’ (Alien) and ‘Die Hard on a bus’ (Speed) convince movie executives to invest vast sums of money in a project on the basis of almost no information.